What is Stewart Brown's poem "West Indies, USA" about?

The ultimate meaning of "West Indies USA" is in the last
three lines, however the entire poem contains the meanings that lead up to the final
one. In other words, in "West Indies, USA," the journey is as important as the
destination. This concept is mirrored in and parallel to the journey the poetic speaker
takes within the text of the poem.

The poetic speaker is flying in a
commercial airplane "Cruising at thirty thousand feet above the endless green" of the
West Indies and Caribbean. The speaker enumerates the highlights he sees as they fly
over on their way to their destination of San Juan, Puerto Rico. As the plane sweeps
overhead to position for a landing at San Juan, the first two stanzas describe the marks
of Westernization on the Caribbean islands of Puerto Rico and the West Indies and US
Virgin Islands and British Virgin Islands: Puerto Rico, with San Juan, is north of the
West Indies; Port-au-Prince is in Haiti, north of Puerto Rico; Picaro Airport serves
Trinidad and Tobago in the British Virgin Islands to the east of the US Virgin Islands;
St. John is the smallest of the islands in the US Virgin Islands to the south of Puerto
Rico.

The next two stanzas criticize--and in so doing, denounce--the
marks of "US regulation" and "barbed / electric fences around America's / back yard"
with "US patrol cars" where "that vaunted sanctuary" echoes the motto of Liberty: "'Give
me your poor...'." The last full stanza compares the two halves of San Juan's dual
reality--and by extension, the Caribbean’s and West Indies’ dual realities--with its
"shanties" versus "condominiums" and its "polished Cadillacs" versus "Rastas
[Rastafarians] with pushcarts."

In this stanza also, Brown calls San
Juan a place like "fool's gold," an allusion to the Gold Rush days when miners found
fool's gold, or a mineral similar to gold that was not gold. He then introduces a
metaphor that compares San Juan to a television that has "fallen / off the back of a
lorry [large truck]," with "twisted wires" on the road. He ends by saying that despite
the polished trappings of Americanism, the West Indies are "sharp ... and dangerous,"
but most of all, they "belonged to someone else." Brown ends with this dramatic
metaphoric appeal to what one can only call true liberty, which is symbolized by Lady
Liberty's torch and which would replace the hollow echo of "'Give me your
poor...'."